


Echoes

by LadyRhiyana



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Gen, Modern Setting, Reincarnation, fluff and past sorrows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 00:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6351397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyRhiyana/pseuds/LadyRhiyana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even now, so many years after her death, Sesshoumaru finds echoes of the little girl among the dispossessed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Brought over from ff.net. No social workers were harmed during the making of this story.

Civilisation, the humans called it. Progress. Twenty million people, crammed cheek by jowl into one city, this Eastern capital. They spoke of human rights and fundamental freedoms, but they were only rights for those who could afford them. For the poor, the dispossessed, the wretched creatures beneath human society’s notice, life was not much different now than it was five hundred years ago.

Sesshoumaru knew. Rin had once been one of the despised ones, before she had abandoned her human life to follow him. Even now, so many years after her death, he caught glimpses of her among the dispossessed –

A woman, her face bruised, her eyes lowered as she held her infant close, rocking it, protecting it, singing to it in a thin, sad voice. He took a step closer, and she retreated, clutching the baby tightly, glaring at him fiercely.

A girl, no more than sixteen, her face a mask of thickly applied cosmetics, her movements sluggish and stiff. When she reached out to him, her lips were blue, her hands were shaking, and he could see the track marks in her arm.

A young child, filthy, crouching almost naked in the street, her eyes dark and ancient.

_“Rin trusted Sesshoumaru-sama,” she had whispered, her shivering subsiding as he wrapped his warm pelt around her, “because of his eyes. Some of the villagers hurt Rin because they could, because they liked it, but Sesshoumaru-sama is not like that.”_

Children had always trusted him. Even wary, feral, stripped of all innocence and joy, they nevertheless seemed to see something in him - 

_“Sesshoumaru-sama is a youkai, but the villagers were crueler to Rin than Sesshoumaru-sama has ever been…”_

**

“Why do you waste your time in those slums, Sesshoumaru?” the other great taiyoukai asked. Dressed in tailored black business suits, their markings and demonic characteristics magically disguised, they ruled their empires from their boardrooms, controlling their subjects with money and the threat of human discovery.

Sesshoumaru dressed in white and crimson still, refusing to disguise himself. He wandered as he had always done, Tenseiga openly at his side, not fearing exterminators – he was Sesshoumaru of the West, and all who crossed him died. He did not accumulate wealth like a zealous, grasping merchant, and nor did he insist upon complete control over every single youkai within his territory. He simply was.

“Because I can,” he answered them, dismissing their scorn and disapproval as irrelevant.

The other taiyoukai considered his refusal to adapt to changing circumstances reckless and self-indulgent. In the beginning, during the height of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s purge, they had challenged him, demanding that he conform – when he refused, they tried to kill him, to foster rebellion in the west and overthrow him. Sesshoumaru had destroyed the rebel armies with terrifying ruthlessness and torn their would-be puppet into three still-living parts, sending one third to each of his fellow rulers. 

Since then there had been no more challenges, and Sesshoumaru had been left alone.

**

In her dreams, she remembered what it was to trust. In the night country of her fantasies, the secret garden of her mind, she had a beautiful, ruthless protector who would never turn on her, never abandon her, and never let her down. 

In her real life, she was an orphan, and she had lost faith in father figures. 

She was not sure how old she was. She thought she was some eight or even nine years old; the social worker who tried to take her away had told her she might even be as old as ten. She’d said that she would find Rin’s records and check properly, but Rin had never given her the chance to find out. She’d gone, as soon as the woman turned her back – they’d found her once, but they would not find her again.

There were other children on the streets of Tokyo: cowering, shivering victims, and feral, vicious predators who banded together in gangs to terrorise the others. Rin was neither – Rin was a creeping, sneaking, shadow, searching for something she couldn’t quite define.

She had only told one other person about her dreams. At almost sixteen, older, more sophisticated (more brittle) and more experienced, Ayako-neechan had smirked at her with vivid crimson lips, her black-lined eyes vague, bitter and empty. “There’s no protection without strings, Rin-chan," she'd said. "They all want something in return.” 

Then, seeing Rin’s face fall, she’d sighed and patted her head with drunken, clumsy affection. “It’s a good dream, though…”

As much as she had wanted to protest, Rin knew that Ayako-neechan was right. It was not real, but it was a good dream, the only dream that she had. In a world where everything that she had could be taken away from her at the whim of an older, stronger street rat, it was the only thing that they couldn’t take, the only thing that was truly hers, and she hugged it tightly to herself during the long, cold nights.

_“Sesshoumaru-sama,” she dreamed she said sometimes, on the very coldest nights when she’d had nothing to eat and she felt faint and dizzy, “Rin feels safe when Sesshoumaru-sama is with her. But those samurai, those things they shouted – is Sesshoumaru-sama good or bad?”_

_‘Sesshoumaru-sama’ was warmth, and strength, and a sense of detached irony and magnificent indifference. She heard a soft, whuffled laugh, and then a deep, flat voice. “This Sesshoumaru simply is, Rin.”_

**

Rin moved through the streets cautiously, flitting from shadow to shadow with eyes and ears alert for trouble. She was searching for a new hiding spot, because she had seen social workers near her old one yesterday, and some of the other kids told her that they’d been asking questions about her. Rin didn’t remember much about her life before the streets, because every time she tried she found herself shaking, crying – she remembered shouting, and screaming, and being afraid all the time. 

She never wanted to be that helpless ever again; she was stronger, now, she could live on her own and look after herself. She didn’t need foster parents –

“Hello, Rin.” A soft, coaxing voice, a neutral, non-threatening stance, and a kind-looking, motherly woman stood watching her, her hands open at her sides. “Your name is Rin, isn’t it?”

Rin watched her, backing away slowly. “Yes,” she admitted warily.

“We’ve been looking all over for you, Rin-chan,” the woman said. She made no move to follow. “Are you hungry?”

Rin was starving, but she didn’t tell the woman that. Shaking her head, she backed away further, unaware that she was creeping up on a brick wall until she thumped into it, flinching.

The woman sighed, seeing her fear. She had seen too much of it in too many little girls’ eyes. “I’m not here to take you away, Rin. I just want to know that you’re unharmed…” She kept talking in a rich, soothing voice, hoping to calm the little girl’s fears.

“I’m fine,” Rin said tightly, her voice high and thin with nerves. “I just want you to leave me alone.”

“Aren’t you afraid, out here on the streets? Don’t you want to sleep in a real bed, without worrying about anyone trying to hurt you?”

But that was a mistake. “The only thing I’m worried about is you!” Rin shouted, getting ready to run, and a man in a dark suit appeared from behind the motherly woman, his hands reaching out –

“No, Toshiyo!” the woman said, sharply, but it was too late – he may have meant no harm, but Rin knew only violence at the hands of men.

“No!” She screamed, kicking and struggling and biting. “Let me go!”

Toshiyo flinched, trying to restrain a whirlwind, and the woman sighed, seeing all her hard work destroyed. It would be impossible to gain the girl’s trust now – 

There was a blur of movement and Toshiyo suddenly choked; she whirled around, astonished, to see him lifted near a foot off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clutching at his throat – or rather, at the hand that was holding him in the air. While she froze in shock, the little girl took the opportunity to run, disappearing into the surrounding streets.

“You, human,” the…being said, his voice a flat, impassive monotone, “why were you attacking that girl?” Despite his apparent indifference, she got the sense that he was frighteningly intense.

Toshiyo tried to snarl, tried to choke up some useless, muffled defiance; it was ruthlessly quashed by tightening fingers and a distinct smell of melting flesh. Green mist swirled, and Toshiyo began to scream, and scream, and scream until his neck was melted nearly all the way through. With a disdainful flick of his wrist, the being tossed him aside and shook the gore off his hand. She gaped stupidly at him, at the ruined the ruined wreck of a man, tossed aside as if he was of no consequence. “You…you killed him!” she gasped, horrified. “Y-you killed him!”

He looked up, pinning her with utterly indifferent, completely alien eyes. “I will not ask a third time, human. What do you want with that girl?”

She cringed at the terrible menace buried under the soft, flat tone. “I’m… I’m a social worker,” she stammered, terrified. “I – we – we’ve been watching Rin-chan for a while, now. We just wanted to make sure she was well…” She trailed off, intimidated, but she could not look away – she knew, instinctively, that if she looked away he would kill her.

“From now on,” he said, very, very softly, “she is longer your concern.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but shut it, quietly, when his hand began to glow green. He watched her for some time longer, and then suddenly turned away, casually stepping over Toshiyo’s body as if it were utterly irrelevant.

“Wait!” she called, finally finding the courage to speak. “Who are you?”

He turned to face her. “I am Sesshoumaru,” he said, as if it explained everything.

The name meant nothing to her, and she watched, confused, terrified and awestruck all at once, as he walked away.

**

Sesshoumaru followed the girl’s scent, disturbed by the fear and desperation saturating it. It was not right. She should never be afraid of anything – not her. He did not give his protection lightly, but he had extended it to the filthy, mute girl who had tried to help him in one of his most vulnerable hours. Even after her death, she remained in his mind’s eye, forever skipping and dancing in his wake. And now this girl, a half-glimpsed echo of her memory, another wary, half-feral girl-child with old, old eyes…

_“Rin feels safe with Sesshoumaru-sama…”_

Sesshoumaru, who was neither good nor evil, nor anything but supremely self-interested, could not bear the thought of her fear.

**

Rin cowered in her new hiding place, rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as she shivered and shook. She’d thought she’d been safe on the streets, thought that she was clever enough, stealthy enough to escape forever…

This was the last of her hideouts, the smallest, dingiest, and most uncomfortable; she used it when there was nowhere else to go.

“Girl.”

She flinched, jumped up: and froze. It was the man from the alley, the one who had rescued her – who had moved so quickly and with such shocking violence. But something inside of her knew that deep voice, that flat, utterly indifferent tone. And deep, deep down, she knew the man, the being, who stood in front of her, watching with bored golden eyes.

_He was here! He had come for her!_

“Se…Sesshoumaru-sama?” she asked, hardly daring to hope. For a moment, she thought she saw something very strange in his eyes, something soft, something…warm? But then it was banished, and he was unreadable once more.

“Rin,” he said, in confirmation, in affirmation, and in a tone of casual, absolute command. “Let’s go.”


	2. Part 2

Over the centuries, Sesshoumaru had had many homes, both castle strongholds and smaller houses. As time passed, they all fell: to attacking youkai, to attacking humans, one of them, in Hiroshima, to the nuclear blast, but most of them fell to decay, neglect, and the passing of years. 

The debris of his past lay scattered all over Japan, for those who cared to look.

If he had a home in this time, it was a small, forgotten manor house deep in the country, set among rice farms that had changed but little in the last three or four hundred years. Here, under his indifferent influence, the rice grew without interference from petty mononoke, but the peasants cared little for his presence or protection – as much, he supposed, as he cared for their worries and concerns. 

He was no longer a lord, in the true sense of the word; he had no youkai servants or warriors at his command, and no courtiers flocking around him, seeking his favour and influence. Even Jaken was gone, old age stilling his constant, carping tongue, putting an end to a life of constant, unswerving loyalty.

As Sesshoumaru walked slowly up the path to his house, hidden behind a thick screen of bamboo, the child asleep, completely trusting, on his shoulder, he felt the apathy and isolation inside him ease. 

Something clicked into place. 

This was right. This was as it should be.

**

Rin had never before been out of the city. To her young mind, the world consisted of noisy streets and rushing, indifferent humanity, and was made of steel, concrete, and plastic. In her dreams, she’d seen a different world of deep, dark forests and glorious, sunlit fields of flowers, where the stars shone like brilliant jewels in the night sky – but they weren’t real, couldn’t possibly be real. 

Reality was fear, hunger, and deep, frozen cold.

Something tickled her nose, and she sneezed. She was enveloped in something warm, and wonderfully soft, and she felt safer than she had ever been in her life. She could hear calm, even breathing, and feel a strong, regular heartbeat reverberate through her like a drum. She smiled, and rubbed her cheek over the soft warmth –

“Open your eyes, Rin,” said a deep, calm voice.

She smiled sleepily. “Hai, Sesshoumaru-sama.” She opened her eyes, and yawned, looking straight up into warm golden eyes and a beautiful, alien face.

And then she screamed. 

The strange-familiar creature winced, his ears flinching away from her extremely loud, high-pitched scream, and he almost dropped her. She struggled, trying to get away from him, and eventually jumped to the ground, stumbling, and scrambled away, into the corner of the room where she could watch him with huge, shocked eyes –

His eyes flared red, but then before she could notice it they returned to clear, burnished gold. He blinked, once or twice, staring at her in some confusion.

“Wh-who are you?” she gasped out, her heart beating so fast she could hear it pounding. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

He looked at her silently for a while longer, and then he knelt down, his strange red and white clothes making a soft shushing, rustling sound, his long white hair shifting about him as he moved. He knelt gracefully in the middle of the room while she cowered in the corner, and the sunlight fell on him through the papered sliding doors and turned him into something luminous. 

She saw, with a little shock, that his left sleeve was empty – this glorious, perfect creature, so out of place in Rin’s vision of reality, had only one arm. Somehow, it made her feel better.

“I am Sesshoumaru,” he said, his voice deep and indifferent. “Why do you fear?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out. She stared at him, taking in the reality of his presence, trying to reconcile it with the idealized protector of her dreams. Somehow, the idea of Sesshoumaru-sama had been easier to handle when he had only been a dream. Seeing Sesshoumaru-sama in the flesh was something quite different. 

Slowly, she crawled over the firm, springy floor, not meeting his eyes, watching him warily in case he moved and tried to kill her. She could feel his golden eyes watching her just as warily, allowing her to come closer. Eventually she got close enough to him that she could reach out and touch him, touch those thick, rich clothes – the fabric felt rough, and she knew that it was expensive. She fingered his clothes for a while, and then got up the courage to reach out and take his hand in hers, feeling his soft skin, just like human skin, except that it was milk white, and there were purple stripes on his wrist. His fingers were long, and slender, and he had claws instead of nails – thick, sharp claws that she knew could tear a man’s throat out without a qualm.

But he allowed her to touch them, to run her small, chubby fingers over them – his hand was limp in her hands now, but she could feel the strength and the power of it, and the capacity for lethal violence. Slowly, very slowly, she lifted her eyes to his and found him watching her gravely; somehow, she knew that he would stay still and allow her to inspect him all day, if that was what it took her to accept his reality. 

It was as if the part of her that dreamed was coming closer and closer to the surface, urging her to accept him, telling her that he would never hurt her. Some part of her felt as though she knew him, as though she had always known him; instinct, strong in the very young, told her that she could trust him. 

Deliberately, she ran the soft pad of her finger over the sharp edge of his claws, and watched in fascination as a thin line of blood welled up from the razor sharp cut. His hand shifted in hers and she looked up quickly, seeing his eyes darkened with concern. He lifted her finger up, examined the cut, and then brought it to his mouth and licked it. His tongue was rough, like a dog’s, and she giggled at the sandpapery texture – his eyes shifted back to hers, then, and she smiled brilliantly at him. 

“Sesshoumaru-sama!” she laughed, in proud confirmation, and hugged him tightly. Slowly, and almost awkwardly, he disentangled his hand and put his arm around her, hugging her back.

**

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. 

Sesshoumaru cursed the humans who had taught her fear and distrust, and put the dark, haunted look in her eyes. He would never admit it, but the fear in her eyes on that first day had struck deep –

He understood it had been an instinctive reaction, that the first time his other Rin had seen him, he’d been wounded, vulnerable, and the closest to harmless he’d ever been, but in his mind, it was unthinkable that he would ever harm her. The sight and scent of her fear was enough to raise his hackles, but when that fear was directed towards himself – 

That had been a bad moment.

It took her time to become comfortable with him, to get up the courage to approach him uninvited, to believe that he would allow her anything she asked of him. In truth, he was the one wary of spooking her, as he sat on the porch in the evenings, pretending to watch the stars. If he looked sufficiently still and unthreatening, she would sidle closer and closer, until she could lean against him and share in his warmth. 

She reminded him of the very first days after he resurrected her – the other Rin; he was having trouble keeping them separate in his mind – when she had been wary of the limits of his indulgence. But even then, she had never feared him.

In time, she finally abandoned the last of her doubts, her rational, waking mind accepting him just as completely as her subconscious had. And something else clicked into place, another piece of his life once more as it should be.

**

Time passed. Sesshoumaru-sama became restless, no longer willing to stay at the house, and so when summer came they set out on a journey over his lands. As Rin walked with Sesshoumaru-sama on old, hidden pathways through woods that had remained unchanged for centuries, she looked about her in awe and delight. It was very different to Tokyo, much, much bigger than anything she had ever seen before. In fact, in the beginning, she had been a little afraid of so much endless space – but she had hidden her fears, because she knew Sesshoumaru-sama did not like her to be afraid. 

She thought that he had noticed anyway; Sesshoumaru-sama noticed everything. She saw him watching her sometimes, his eyes puzzled, and she wondered what he was thinking. It was impossible to know – the only clues she had to his feelings were the very small changes of expressions in his eyes, and they only told her if he was pleased, or amused, or on very rare occasions, angry. Sesshoumaru-sama in a temper was a terrible sight, but she knew that he would never harm her – he had told her so, himself.

Once, he had said, he had had another little girl, whose name had also been Rin. He believed that she was the reincarnation of the first Rin –

It had saddened her, a little, to hear that, because it was as though he had chosen her as a replacement for the original Rin. She’d kept the hurt to herself, turning it over and over in her mind, until one day she couldn’t stand to stay silent anymore. 

As she sat with him for the night, wrapped up in his fur, looking at the bright, twinkling stars, she said, “I am not her, you know. I am not the same as the first Rin.”

She did not look at him as she spoke, but gripped his fur tightly in her fists. He was so silent, and so still, that she could feel his heart beating, feel his chest rise and fall as he breathed. 

“I know,” he answered. “I do not expect you to be.” He paused, and then said, “Be yourself, Rin. It is enough that you are.”

She waited a while longer, and he did not say anything else – but his arm wrapped around her as it had done the first day, and he pulled her back against him in an awkward hug. Rin smiled. Reassured, she hugged him back.

**

He looked down at the small, innocent child lying so trustingly against him. He saw her, in his mind’s eye, as a small, skinny girl in a patched kimono, her hair in a ragged tail as she chattered and laughed and sang. No, that girl was long dead – the girl in his arms now was silent and watchful, her dark eyes absorbing everything around her, analyzing and reflecting on her thoughts, rather than expressing them aloud. Nor did she skip, dance and sing, preferring to walk steadily, conserving her energy and strength. 

But for all the differences between them, he saw the same spirit behind her eyes, felt the recognition in his soul for the human girl who had once been such an important part of his life. He knew, even now, that one day she would die and leave him alone again, and he would once more be left in a world filled with echoes of her smile and pale copies of her laughter.

He didn’t care.

_Why do you waste time with that human girl, Sesshoumaru?_

Because I can.

He picked the girl up with his remaining arm, stood up, and walked away, intent on traveling a few more miles before dawn. He would carry her tonight, because he would not be able to carry her forever.


End file.
